Sherman Alexie Superman And Me

In Sherman Alexie's short story, Superman and Me, Alexie wants to create a new perspective of how people perceive Native Americans. Alexie starts his short story by explaining his love for reading. Alexie’s love for reading started because of his father’s love for books, Alexie even writes that he would buy his “books by the pound at Dutch’s Pawn Shop”. Since Alexie saw his father's love for reading, he picked up a comic book and saw that the images corresponded with the text and taught himself how to read. how he taught himself to read at a young age. Growing up, Alexie was stereotyped at school, work and in general by the dominant culture. Alexie’s central idea in Superman and Me is to redefine Native American culture and to break away from stereotypes.

He was also teased for being smart because he knew how to read before some of his classmates. By the time he was in kindergarten he was reading “Grapes of Wrath”. As Alexie gets older he still does not feel accepted; he starts to feel stereotyped in class for being smart, he even writes “if he'd be anything but an indian boy living on the reservation, he might have been called a prodigy. But he is an Indian boy living on the reservation and is simply an oddity.” Alexie does not feel accepted in school and feels different even though he isn’t. Alexie uses this experience of not fitting in, to emphasis his general idea of how people stereotype native americans and that it can really affect someone growing